I'm doing a piano bench that needs to match the pianos eight sided, tapered legs. I recall you did a pencil post bed with 8 sides. I do quite a few 2 sided tapers and understand how to do a 4 sided taper with my table saw sled. How do I go about getting 8 equal sides? My thought is to support the leg with a center point and have an indexed location for the eight sides but .......? I appreciate any advice you can give to save me lots of experimentation.
-John
Las Vegas , NV
Our Expert
Shaping an eight-sided taper is really quite easy; it's really just a four-sided taper with chamfered corners. I use a table-mounted router and a 45 degree chamfer bit such as Amana Tool no.49403.
When shaping a chamfer on a taper the cutting depth must gradually and continually increase as you shape from the small end to the large end. The solution is a jig with a tapered base which supports each end of the leg at the correct height.
As you can see from the attached drawing the jig is tapered in both the horizontal and vertical planes.
